Speaker #1: If there were no
NCAR, would we create the same institution today?
Can you/would you build an NCAR and what would it
look like? There seemed to be no interest in this
question and Speaker #1 left the room.

Speaker #2: The issue here is
fundamental understanding, which is distinct from
research.

Speaker #3: Agreed with Speaker
#2. There is also a human resource issue: how to
provide the right people to achieve these
fundamental understandings.

Speaker #4: We should create
"virtual labs" with funding shifting among
institutions.

Speaker #5: ?? Didn't get his
comment

Speaker #6: In order to get funding you have to frame a
fundamental research question as a focused, named
program.

Speaker #7: Need to work toward observing
capabilities that are really focused, not just "mom and
apple pie." For example we need more moisture measurements.
.

Speaker #8: What do we need to measure?
Need to focus on what we need to measure, how often based on
correlations, etc.

Speaker #9: Sometimes you don't need more
measurements. You may need to observe another variable
altogether.

Speaker #8: Sometimes we tend to measure
what the instruments can do rather than what we
need.

Speaker #10: Do we analyze the data we
have? There is a mass of satellite data from space that's
never analyzed; not much is spent on data
analysis.

Speaker #11: Universities don't develop
instruments any more.

Speaker #12: Look at fundamental
application problems and what fundamental understanding is
needed to solve them. We tend to identify the applications
and let that drive the fundamental understanding.

Speaker #13: Disagreed with the general
tenor of the discussion. History is full of examples where
the establishment, following one route, determined the
resources and a (young) researcher from left field came
along and "blew the whole game." You can't open the door to
the bureaucrats to decide what's important. People in this
room are the establishment and think they know what's
important [but they may not].

Speaker #14: There is a serious problem
with the political process driving the scientific process.
The money is not in disciplinary science, it's
bureaucrat-driven. In astronomy, telescopes are
overcapitalized (believe it or not) and there are not enough
grants to use the "glass." Increases in the NSF budget
didn't help basic research budget.

Speaker #15: Was disturbed by the tenor
of Bob Corell's remarks. Doesn't like the new NSF
initiatives [taking up so much of NSF's
budget].

Speaker #16: Science is driven by what
can be funded. In the 1970s there was an initiative [at
NSF? ] called "research applied to national needs," It
failed because the research community didn't buy into
it.

Speaker #10: We are spending an
increasing proportion of our research budgets on assessments
and the search for consensus, not on new discoveries. We are
asked to answer a few questions based on what you already
know - a danger. The community is becoming consultants to
the decision-makers.

Speaker #17: It's important to maintain a
body of fundamental research. These days we have to sell
that fundamental research as yeilding benefits [to
society].

Speaker #18: Astronomy sets priorities
for the decade. They all got together and decided that their
top priority was the Hubble Space Telescope and they got it.

There followed a general discussion of
whether astronomy really was better organized-how the
current priority setting is going, what the relative size of
the astronomical community is and whether their funding is
in fact declining.

Speaker #13: Compared to atmospheric
research, astronomy is "pathetic" on societal relevance, but
they get funding because people are interested.

Speaker #19: Astronomical community is in
fact poorer.

Speaker #20: Physics lived for decades on
the Manhattan Project. (Maurice had some other examples.)
Many fundamental discoveries wouldn't have been made if
society had funded purely curiosity-driven research. Maurice
likes the BASC reports focus on integrated observations and
analysis, with an emphasis on modeling.

Discussion here shifted to human
resources: Are we attracting the best minds?

Speaker #21: Are we attracting the cream
of the crop - the top 5%? I don't think so. They are
attracted to esoteric topics.

Conveners: What are the barriers to
attracting the "best and the brightest"? Are the atmospheric
sciences attracting fewer people?

Speaker #22: Science recruitment has
leveled off. Part is the economy. Curricula don't meet
students' expectations. Students were saying to John Firor
they wanted to be educated to save the world, but were
educated too narrowly. Or They come into environmental
classes wanting to "save the world," and what we teach them
has no relevance.

Speaker #16: We say the number of bright
students has gone down but really it per school that they
have gone down because there are more schools training
atmospheric scientists. Students get more money in fields
like computer science.

Speaker #11: They want to "save the
world" but they don't want to pay the price. But the problem
is the downfall of K-12 education in this country. In the
70's there was more emphasis on the economy - then the
environmental problem came.

Speaker #10: I don't think NCAR has found
a way to link with K-12 even thought they have tried very
hard.

Speaker #23: The collapse of K-12
education isn't the root problem. The problem is the
parallel decline in the values. We live in an
anti-intellectual culture and basic science is an extremely
intellectual pursuit. Intellectual success is not valued in
society.

Speaker #24: People recognize what they
want to do on their own. They don't need a meeting. Look at
community models: We provide community models that save
people from having to write their own code. Students need
resources to save having to learn equations.

Speaker #14: Has wondered privately
whether we should not use community models to educate
scientists.

Speaker #22: Opposite experience with
CCM3. They port it to a workstation and then they tear it
apart. He thinks there is a definite problem with retaining
students. Some of the best oceanography PhD candidates have
left the field altogether after passing their exams, but
before they finished. Maybe they don't like their advisor's
lifestyle.

Speaker #25: If the education supply line
has collapsed the universities are affected,

Speaker #7: Are our students as good? At
the U of Oklahoma with 130 meteorology majors we graduate 25
or 30 (75% are out of state.) UCAR could conduct a survey-a
five-year database of where students are going.

Speaker #26: We show students exciting
interdisciplinary problems in K-12 and then we put them in
undergraduate programs where the curriculum is entirely
disciplinary-based.

Speaker #11: Students are not put off by
hard work, but are put off by the type of work - doing
proposals.

Speaker #8: Related is how we treat our
postdocs in this field - having these people work on someone
else's problem; they are working on the research of
more-senior scientists.

Speaker #11: to continue the discussion
send email to emaunel@texmex.mit.edu